Peggy Noonan Declares Obamacare Fit For A Watery Grave

Deep in the New York night, Sister Peggy Noonan, ensconced in a cocoon of bed sheets that smelled vaguely of rosewater and Kaopectate, tossed and turned in the fevered grip of a Technicolor dream. She was on a ship, a steamliner like the great conveyances that once roamed the oceans, carrying humans from port to port in less time than it took for an assembly line in Detroit to crank out several hundred Edsels. Sister Peggy stood on the deck of this ship, shivering as cold air sank into her withered bones. Out of nowhere an iceberg loomed. The great ocean liner scraped the side of the berg, sending fresh ice cascading onto the deck. Just in time, Sister Peggy thought, as the bartender on the Lido Deck had been out of ice and she’d had to take her nightly medicine neat.

There was panic around her as fellow passengers – great titans and captains of industry with names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Carnegie – pushed towards the lifeboats as their servants cleared a path by trampling the bodies of the lower orders who had made their way up from steerage. Peggy looked up to the bridge, where the ship’s Negro captain, resplendent in golf pants, club bag slung over one shoulder, watched over the chaos with a detached expression on his face. A Negro captain? Why she never! What was she doing on this ship? Peggy shook her head violently, whipping it from side to side, her brain careening off the walls of her skull. And then she was awake, safe in her own bed. She turned on the light and reached for the pitcher of Robitussin-and-gin martinis that her man-servant had placed on the nightstand earlier before retiring to wherever it was he went at night. She sipped from the pitcher and soon her shuddering was entirely pseudoephedrine-related.

It's not just a buggy website, it's a disaster of Titanic proportions.

Ugh, must this hyperbole get rolled out every time something does not go according to plan? It’s as played out as “Worse than Hitler!” Hey, you know what was really a disaster of Titanic proportions? TheTitanic!

(D)oes anyone think that the economics of the ACA, the content as set out and expressed on the sites, will flow smoothly, coherently, and fully satisfy the objectives of expanding health-insurance coverage while lowering its cost... Does anyone think the president will back off and delay the program for enough time not only to get the technological side going but seriously improve the economics?

That’s just old-lady-wingnut gibberish for “Repeal the law and cut taxes like Reagan would have done!” Um, Pegs? We’ve had this debate. We have had it every day since early 2009. It has been a loud and robust debate, though it may have been hard to hear through all the shrieking about socialism and death panels. Also we had a whole contretemps recently about trying to force the president to repeal his signature domestic legislation. You may have heard something about that? The damn thing is law, it’s a little late to whine about how sure you are it won’t work, not that that will stop you.

Norman Ornstein in National Journal this week reminds us of Democratic Sen. Max Baucus's iceberg warning—actually "train wreck"—at a hearing six months ago, in April. He warned implementation of ObamaCare could be a disaster.

We like Norm Ornstein, at least as much as our angry liberal heart allows us to like an AEI hack, but though he correctly notes that Baucus was not talking about the law itself, he still got this one wrong. And even then Peggy got wrong Ornstein's being wrong. Baucus was not talking about Obamacare implementation. He was talking about the advertising and public-relations efforts to educate the public about the law. Said efforts, we should note, were hamstrung by Congress slashing funding for it, so much so that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had to go begging private donors for help. How is it that yr Wonkette knows this and Peggy Noonan and the fact checkers at the Wall Street Journal do not? Pegs, you are either deliberately lying or A Idiot. We’re going to guess c) all of the above.

He talks but he doesn't implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions.

IRS scandal! Drink!

We're all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. "How could I have been so stupid?" he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he'd blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments.

Jesus H. Christ piloting a U2 over Havana, we’re getting the Titanic and Bay of Pigs in one column. Someone really should get hold of Peggy’s cable and block The History Channel.

The pitcher of martinis was long exhausted but still Sister Margaret Ellen Noonan could not sleep. Dawn poked at the edges of the heavy blackout curtains covering her bedroom window. She laid aside the prescription label on which she had finished scratching out this week’s column. She was exhausted, enervated. Looking down one’s nose at the lower orders all the time was tiring work! Perhaps, she thought, she would stay in today.

[ WSJ ]